Meet Sven.

But how do we know we’ve got a Struggling Sven? And, more importantly, how do we help him?

Spotting Sven in the Class Console

Sven’s progress might be looking a lot like the rest of the class, so it’s easy for him to go unnoticed. That’s why, as a facilitator, it’s useful to pop in and take a look at individual learner’s tasks.

With the automarked tasks, we can see he’s struggling. In some cases he’s had two or three attempts at the task but to no avail.

And, opening up his essay task we can see he’s just written a sentence that’s somewhat off the mark.

Supporting Sven

Sven is probably in need of intervention from you as a facilitator. Analyse his responses and talk to Sven to see if you can pinpoint and alleviate his struggles.

There are two main ways you might reach out to Sven.

Specific feedback via tasks

For help relating to a specific manually marked task, the best way to support Sven is with some very specific feedback and feedforward.

General support and feedback

For more global support and feedback, you might want to email Sven, or even set up a call or video call.

Reaching out to Sven will let him know that someone is there who cares about his progress and achievement. That will be a big motivator for Sven to keep persevering.

Leveraging Sven’s strengths

Sven has been consistently logging on and giving things a go. Though he might be struggling a bit, he’s been rather motivated. This means you might be able to suggest some further resources to support Sven - readings, videos, tasks.

What might be useful for Sven is to have some support in planning out what order to dive into these resources. It might help to give Sven a relatively narrow focus for each resource - E.g. “Read the second page only and have a go at tasks 2a, 3 and 4a and b.”

Sven is just one of the online learner personas we've explored in our series on the six online learners who need your help (now!).